From the monthly archives:
Google’s online office suite received a major facelift and now allows users to organize their documents in a folder view. The old layout was replaced with a frame based view, with folders to organize a large number of documents, created and shared with others. Also easy sharing between users you’ve shared with before, and filtering results dynamically along with types are other new features.
Popularity: 24% [?]
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Attachments in email are very useful for distributing files, but often, there are limitations on the sizes of the attachment and the fact that the attachments are sent through a post request is insecure and rather inefficient. There are several other options like uploading to rapidshare or to other uploading services, but again, security, size is an issue. Coming to our rescue is Civil Netizen, a software frontend file uploading and transferring service.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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Limit Time: Tell yourself to get off in a particular amount of time. There are several software to display an alarm after a given amount of time. Also take several breaks if your career depends on your presence online, like blogging or web-designing.
Pageaddict: This is a marvelous extension. It logs which site you visit, and how long you spend on it, and you can view all the statistics later in forms of tables and graphs. So if you unknowingly spend too much time on YouTube or the likes, you’ll know. You can also set certain domains as “Work Sites” and they won’t be counted. Your browsing data is private and is stored on your hard disk.
Links: http://pageaddict.com/ #The main website.
http://pageaddict.com/screenshots.html #Sample data display
You need to visit pageaddict.com after installing to see your data.
TimeTracker: This simple extension simply places a little timer in the status bar, and you can see how much time you’ve wasted today, and the average amount you spend on firefox in a day.
[TimeTracker at Mozilla Addons]
You can also try Usage Counter, which is slightly more advance but I don’t use it.
FoxyMeter: The tagline for this extension goes “How have you surfed” and it unobtrusively sits and reminds you just that. I suggest that everyone try this out, and you’ll be very surprised with just how many pages you surfed. My meter’s sitting right now at 1469 page loads at 113 page loads a day.
[FoxyMeter at Mozilla Addons]
ThumbStrips(Special Mention): I found this extension recently and it’s really nice to get a feel of the kind of websites that you’re visiting. It’s an extension that takes a screenshot of every website that you visit and saves it along with your history and you can see all the sites and get a good overview of where your time was going.
[I found this mentioned in Digital Inspiration]
Why install these addons?
Time is precious, that’s why. Also less time on your online life means more time for your offline one. And I assure you, an hour in the gym is much more gratifying than spending it idly browsing flickr or youtube, or other sites that go on and on. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to use those sites, I’m saying they never run out of content and more often than not, that time can be used for better purposes, and these extensions will help you see where your time is going. Ultimately, the last word is yours alone.
Popularity: 32% [?]
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I’ve been a Sony Ericsson fan since I bought a SE K700i in the second half of 2004, but times have since changed and I can no longer afford one of those fancy all-in-one mobile phones. For now, I’m stuck with a Nokia 1110, and this post concerns some of the low-end Nokia handsets I’ve seen/used. Yeah, go on, laugh it off, funny man. I know where you live, and I’m coming over for dinner.
Seriously, though, for the past week or so, I’ve been on the wrong end (suprisingly) of unwanted, annoying phone calls and SMS messages from a certain number. I contacted one of the people at the Hutch front office about the possibility of blocking all calls and messages from that number, but I lost interest after the words ‘police’ and ‘FIR’ were mentioned.
This morning, while I was idly pressing random buttons on the phone, I came across the ‘No. Screening’ submenu (under the Contacts menu), and I asked myself, “Could this be what I’ve been looking for?”
I added my own number to the screened number list and sent myself a text message. What happened next brought tears of joy to my eyes. I’d have wiped them dry, but I was sitting on my porcelain throne with a cigarette in one hand and the phone in the other, and burning my eyebrows off was not on my TODO list for today.
This is what number screening does: When a text message is received from a screened number, it is automagically routed into the ‘Screened messages’ folder without triggering ANY of your usual message alerts. When you get an incoming call from a screened number, it will not trigger any sort of alerts, but the number and a dustbin icon will show up on your screen. You can either answer or reject the call, or just leave it as it is and treat the caller to some delectable Himesh Reshammiya caller tune goodness.
Sadly, there isn’t a whole lot of information about this on the interwebs, and being the kind, generous non-Grinch I am, I figured I ought to share this information with all my kinsfolk who share my annoying-called and constipation grief with me. There you have it: What number screening really means.
PS: I’m not sure if ALL low-end Nokia phones have this feature. If you’re a Nokia user, let me know via the comment box below if your phone has the number screening option and maybe I’ll put up a list later.
Popularity: 100% [?]
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Since Shrek stepped into the scene, animation movies genre became stronger than ever, not many very sure despite previous highly grossing movies that this could actually be a full fledged field of film making.
Ever thought how he has made? What kind of technology did they use? especially what operation system did they use?
Tabbing through various articles linux journal had this interesting post and what happens to be the cover story of their monthly journal, this post sheds some details on how the ogre really came to life.
Why don’t the movie studios contribute some of their millions of lines of Linux code to open source? Many studios have developed proprietary Linux video playback and editing software, an area where open source is deficient. Could they give that to open source?
I remember asking a friend, that if these OSs are free and Open Source, really who pays for thier development? It never hit me that nearly 90% of the webservers run Linux. :O wew!
I liked that this article also focused on some of those issues.
Read: DreamWorks Animation “Shrek the Third”: Linux Feeds an Ogre
Popularity: 11% [?]
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Linux has dumped it’s old image of being text terminal and weak graphics. Many now even consider it to have more eye candy than other competing operating systems like Mac OSX and windows, with beryl and compiz. The next major release of KDE(K Desktop Environment) comes with several heralded advancements, one of them being the Oxygen graphics and iconset. This has been heralded by many as one of the biggest opensource graphics projects, and has been kept at utmost secrecy for some reason. Though minor previews are available. Keep watching for more updates on linux eye candy.
Links:
Latest preview of Oxygen Icons: Link
Oxygen icons preview page(old): Link
Amarok 2 SVN with partial Oxygen Icons: Link
Popularity: 29% [?]
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